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Mission of the Department

The mission of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Florida is feminist education, research, and practice. We promote social justice by engaging students in the discovery and production of knowledge that emerges from feminist perspectives on culture and society.

We teach students to use the analytic skills that emerge from engaging the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, and nation in order to promote responsible citizenship in a diverse transnational environment.

We expose limits in traditional higher education caused by excluding women and other marginalized groups and create knowledge that is transformative and inclusive. We aim for knowledge that will better all people’s lives, not just the lives of a few.

We connect our work as academics with the social, political, and economic world outside the university to educate our students about social inequalities that result from sexism, heterosexism and homophobia, racism, classism, able-ism, and ethnocentrism. We link knowledge, research, teaching, and activism.

We seek to empower students through a feminist critique of social, cultural, and institutional structures that enables them to think more critically about their own lives and that inspires them to work as active citizens for social change.